Walking In Circles Blog

3: Entrances, Portals, Doors

Changes of State

In a documentary about his seminal Institut du Monde Arabe in Paris, the architect Jean Nouvel talks about using the lift between floors like a film director would use a cut: when the doors open, the protagonists enter a new scene. Innumerable psychologists and psychiatrists search to unlock portals that offer insights into mania and pathological behaviour. The Doors of Perception by Aldous Huxley, first published in 1954, details his experiences when taking mescaline, and takes its title from a phrase in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, William Blake’s 1793 poem.

Transformation, integral to portals, doesn’t have to be spiritual. If you had the courage to cross this particular threshold in the 1920s, you would have witnessed the rise of the communist party in Italy (click to read more)...

The residents of the courtyard followed the example of their predecessors and added dates to the inscription, imploring the Madonna for safety during enemy shelling, firstly from Austrian bombs, then in WW1. It brings to mind that story in 'Fever Pitch' by Nick Hornby...

An estate agent, bent on rushing Marika and I to the next floridly overwritten apartment on sale (una chicca signori!) took the short-cut from Celestia into the heart of Castello via the Sotoportego Zorzi. A transformation occurred (Click to read more)